THE TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN

KIRKUS REVIEW

Ethnography, allegory, anthropology, psychology and a touch of Kafka's Metamorphoses are all components of this unusual case history of one man's hallucinogenic experience. The author, an anthropology student at the University of California, was apprenticed for four years to Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian ""brujo"" or sorcerer. The training involved the use of peyote, Jimson weed and an unidentified type of mushroom but, more important, the conceptualization of a higher order, an alien rationale that enabled the author to perceive the ""pragmatic nature of nonordinary reality."" There is the same strong strain of anthropomorphism one was confronted with in Two Leggings (1967, p. 544) and the same sense of disinterred reality. His visions may seem irrational to the twentieth century mind but Mr. Castaneda does provide a logical and coherent structural analysis and the book will provoke interest somewhere between the scientist and the drug speculator.

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